Posted
by
michael
on Saturday May 10, 2003 @05:55AM
from the give-in-to-the-power-of-debian dept.

TheMadPenguin writes "When I heard about Libranet 2.8 containing KDE 3.1 and kernel 2.4.20 in our forums, I just about fell out of the chair I was sitting in. As you all probably already know, Libranet is a Debian-based distro aimed toward the desktop user. Until now, I had never heard of a Debian release with all the newest goodies, but my world was about to get turned upside down. Read the full review with screenshots at MadPenguin.org."

Not only that, but the Anti-aliasing examples look a bit suspicious to me.

I recently installed KDE 3.1 onto my Gentoo machine (it's usually a headless box, but I was curious to see the improvements in KDE). The sans-serif fonts were all very nice, but bring up Slashdot with the "Times" font and it looked horrific! I'm not saying that/. is the last word in beautiful Web design, but the anti-aliasing actually made it look worse. I might try throwing some Windows fonts onto the box to see if it's better at some point...

Looks fine on this Gentoo box. In fact, I recently compared a new XP Pro notebook from work, an Nvidia Go P4, side-by-side with this AA'd P2 w/ ATI 4 meg video card and the screen rendering on the Gentoo box looked leagues better to my eye. (Am I correct that XP doesn't anti-alias, relying instead on the quality of their fonts?) This was comparing IE to Phoenix. Compared to 'links' compiled with svga support, the gap was greater still.

No troll intended, in my experience an anti-aliased xfree desktop now ren

To me this seems realy quite good.It sets up many of the thing a new linux user wants by default. (AA fonts for one)This is somthing that realy is a must 'cus theres nothing worse than trying to read crappy fonts, and its a big put off when you try and change.

I know things like this are relativly simple, but there not when you're new.

Testing which I think you confused with unstable is now sarge. It will be the next stable when it is finnished. Packages from unstable flow to testing when there are no dependency problems and critical bugs

Current stable is woody. Woody only gets security updates from debian. This is to ensure that a running system will not break because of an upgrade of software. But there are many backports available of newer software on www.apt-get.org

I have tried al tree branches of Debian. I love Debian on my servers, and stable and testing work great on them. But for the workstation, I found Debian unacceptable. Testing was simply not actual enough, and unstable too often broke. So for my workstations I have switched to OS X wheneever possible, and on x86 I am experimenting with gentoo and even considering *gasp*.. redhat.. Libranet sounds great, but for 40 $ I think I'd rather look somewhere else.

You know what? I don't care. I don't care that if there were some big changes going on (how come other distros didn't suffer from these big changes (like GCC3-migration)?). All I care is that are the packages available. Many people like to say "Just run Unstable if you want the absolute bleeding-edge", when the fact is that unstable is not bleeding edge either. Big and important packages can be delayed for months while other distros are already happily running them.

Debian's myth of not being up to date, is partly the result of, well, not the best marketing: the distribution is divided into stable, testing and unstable. Stable is where most newcomers look, wouldn't you, for the current working distro. It sounds reassuring. However, unstable is a bit of a misnomer, because while we understand that it is not "guaranteed" in the same way to be stable, it is by no means unstable, it is rather where the new stuff is to be found, and what most newcommers t

I don't think that it's easy to say that it's a good desktop platform for those who don't know how to setup a desktop platform.

You have to take into consideration that many of the configurations take considerable knowledge, and even the most basic things require a lot of documentation reading to get working (such as choosing a print spooler among many, enabling true type fonts on your own when the HOWTOs talk about xfs, xft, etc which may or may not apply to your system, learning the Debian-way of doing t

You have to take into consideration that many of the configurations take considerable knowledge, and even the most basic things require a lot of documentation reading to get working

Not really. Pretty much everything you mentioned has been reduced to a few prompts during package installation. Configuring your hardware is still a pain, but the new installer that's under development should fix that (Knoppix already does a great job; don't know about Libranet). I run unstable on my desktops and I have an

What I really don't understand is why some distros supply screenshots on their webpage, or why there is screenshots in reviews. If this was redhat, with it's special kde & gnome mixture thing (correct me if i am wrong), it would be OK, but this is just plain KDE 3.x.
I am running Debian myself, and I don't see any difference in this KDE and the KDE I am using, okey there is a few new icons, but that would be the only thing.
And what is the big deal with Libranet beeing shipped with KDE 3.1 anyway? It's not that new and debian unstable has had it for some time now. The same with Linux 2.4.20, it has been stable for some time now, and it's not new!
Still it is looking nice for the desktop with it's GUI frontends for package management, and maybe it has some other nice tools as well.

Fonts in Unix SUCK! With a capital S. Only recently during the last 2 years did X and kde even have anti aliagned and true type fonts. The fonts provided are mediocre but a huge improvment. Windows and MacOSX are much more appealing to my eyes and have alot of R&D went into developing them.

Try looking at Slashdot in Mozilla from Linux and then Windows. See the difference? The Windows platform looks 10 times better.

What I really don't understand is why some distros supply screenshots on their webpage, or why there is screenshots in reviews.

Because not all desktop PC users have used KDE 3.1 before, perchance?

I recently helped a friend to install RedHat 8 on his laptop (no mean achievement...the PCMCIA hardware wouldn't play ball but that's a different thread), and the one thing he was most worried about was whether or not he'd be able to work out how to use the browser/mail client/office software/etc. As you could

Oh I agree, I use it (version 0.80 I believe) as my default WM here. However, that's because I've a few years experience of using NeXTStep under my belt. My colleague had a number of years of Windows experience behind him, so Window Maker probably wouldn't have been very intuitive to him. KDE3, on the other hand, is pretty much designed to behave like Windows (especially XP), so it was a much better choice for a beginner.

I've never encountered a font, on any platform (or at least linux, windows, dos, mac, atari st, amiga, sun), that looks better for text editing and writing code than the default fixed 6x9 font used by xterms. The characters are small enough not to be overly wasteful of space, but somehow appear very clear and unambiguous-- they are drawn really well.

Not that I would encourage anyone to violate the sanctity of an EULA, but if you happen by a windows box the fonts are pre-extracted and just sitting in the C:\WINNT\Fonts directory. Odds are you just have to copy them to your fonts directory on your linux box. All theoretical, mind you...

The legal way is using the extractor utilities (see sourceforge) to pull the fonts out of the setup package microsoft was offering. Take the newly extracted fonts - identical to the ones located on the windows box - an

I'm really curious, why do you want to avoid all those things? I understand Opera, for example, you either pay or you get those hideous banners, but what is the problem with the rest? Assuming, of course, you want to build a workstation, not a server, for which case Libranet is a bit of a wrong solution imho.

The reason is quite simple. As a Free Software [gnu.org] follower, I don't want to use any software which doesn't give the freedoms/rights I want for myself and everyone else.

In less abstract terms: I don't want to agree to Reals license agreements or use their software, because it doesn't allow to do the things I should be allowed to do: study how it works, make changes to it and distribute derivative works (I would need the source code, and permission to use it for this to be possible). If you hang on a while I'l

Opera 6.0
I can't get my hands on a license without downloading the software:(

RealPlayer
The same thing. They obviously don't want us to read it unecessarily:)

Flash [macromedia.com]
You may not alter, merge, modify, adapt or translate the Software, or decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise reduce the Software to a human-perceivable form.
That's more clear cut, and straight out said than in most licenses:)...
You may not modify the Software or create derivative works base

I understand your viewpoint for most of the examples there (Flash especially - as having the source would mean I could actually compile it for my Mac PPC running Gentoo). However, I'm very happy with Nvidia releasing their own drivers for their own hardware. They work great, and I doubt anyone could do a better job. I believe that about any low-level hardware drivers; if they work well for my distros, then I'm happy. If they don't then I return the hardware (luckily many manufacturers, when they mention "Li

Fair enough... This is actually a fairly complete answer. I just use the software that does the job I want to do but I appreciate your viewpoint. I don't agree with RMS's view of the world and of software (and I don't think it is a subject that can be discussed in/. without flames and trolling), but I guess if it works for you it is ok with me... I haven't had much experience with using just Free software other than Redhat 8.0 which, as I understand, comes out of the box with only GPL software and, frankly

While LibraNet is certainly impressive, I must mention that Knoppix provides the "cutting edge" traits mentioned -- KDE 3.1, Linux-2.4.20-xfs, etc. -- with the bonus of the most mature automatic hardware detection algorithms in the x86 space.

And once you run knx-hdinstall, apt-get is more than happy to function normally.

Knoppix is very fun to see spread through schools; it's exponential growth at its finest:-)

My biggest gripe with Debian has always been its reluctance to include new software. If reliability is important, you should be conservative, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.:-) I'm pleased that there is a new Debian-based distro that doesn't force me to take this approach.

(For example, I do a lot with IPv6 because it's easier than setting up VPNs and then dealing with numbering conflicts. If I was going to be conservative, and avoid IPv6 on the grounds that it is too new, it would make my job har

Yes -- Debian stable has programs that are (in some cases) slightly out of date, and do not have the features of newest releases. The clue is in the name, though; they have been rigourously tested for stability. If you want to sacrifice stability (aimed more at servers) for features (aimed more at desktops), use unstable/testing. You don't even have to have all programs as unstable/testing -- you can choose which ones to pin where.

When will people stop criticising Debian for being conservative when it isn't; Debian does have bleeding edge versions of most of the packages available, in the unstable/testing repositories. You *just* have to tell it to use them.

Sorry, unstable/testing isn't really cutting edge either. It took 9 frigging months for Xfree 4.2 to appear in Unstable, and it took even longer for KDE3!

Yes, and that's where you lack the background context about why the above 2 things took a long time.

Incidentally, Debian is more unstable/cutting edge than you think. It has had gcc 3.2.3 pre-release versions for months, and the glibc maintainers seem to regularly do updates from CVS. The samba in unstable is 2.999alpha23. The new module utils for ke

Yes, and that's where you lack the background context about why the above 2 things took a long time.

I'm well aware of the reasons for the delay. And guess what? I don't care for their reasons! All I care is that is the software in there or isn't it. And in this case, it wasn't. Other distros had them, Debian did not. So the people who say that Unstable is cutting-edge, are simply wrong. Perhaps it would be closer to the truth is they said "Unstable is more or less current, unless some big and important pa

If you don't care, don't use it. People above have given you the reasons why KDE and X were delayed. Even then, it was easy to find and add a deb line to apt-get them. I guess Debian wasn't meant for you.

Debian runs on more arches than any other Linux distro. It takes some doing to get something as large and as complex as XFree86 running acceptably on all of them. No, "Debian should only worry about x86 because everybody uses it." is not the answer. If it wasn't for Debian, many users of alternate arches would be out in the cold.

I'll grant that KDE3 took way too long. There was much wrangling over the GCC 3 and glibc 2.3 transistions. However, I survived on unofficial ports for much of that time.

Sorry, unstable/testing isn't really cutting edge either. It took 9 frigging months for Xfree 4.2 to appear in Unstable, and it took even longer for KDE3!

Pish. If you want the latest on unstable, it's trivial to get it. You just have to add some non-official sources for apt-get to use. I ran KDE 3.0 on my unstable boxen all through most of the pre-releases. My experience is that unofficial Debian packages are about as buggy and problematic as official, released RedHat and Mandrake packages, whereas t

If you want the latest on unstable, it's trivial to get it. You just have to add some non-official sources for apt-get to use.

Perhaps, but we are not talking about some semi-official sources, we are talking about the unstable-tree. First claim was was that "Unstable is bleeding edge". I disagreed. Now people say that "Oh, but you have to install them from this different location...". Well, we aren't talking about Unstable anymore. In my book, "Unstable" is the stuff you get when you have specified that yo

If you add other sourced besides the unstable, then it is not the standard unstable anymore.

So what? The point is that you can easily stay closer to current by using Debian than with any other distro, other than source distros. Your stability will suffer, but you can do it easily. If you prefer not to go that far, you can use unstable, which is always fairly close to the bleeding edge but is pretty reliable. And so on through testing (usually; testing is in bad shape at the moment) and stable.

Well frankly that stinks of the whole "I want free as in speech, but only if it means it's free as in beer" attitude that is rampant on Slashdot.

When RedHat tried to make an honest buck from the product they worked on people just downloaded off BitTorrent. Here you are complaining that Libranet aren't hosting huge ISOs for free download at their expense (both in terms of bandwidth and the money spent creating the product).

Well, Red Hat was going to put the isos up in a week. The fact that I had them three days earlier doesn't make me feel bad. I'll try to find somewhere to download Libranet, and if I like it, I'll pay for a copy.

I agree... if a company is going to have a GNU/Linux distributions, seems to me they should abide by the GNU License. I dont see anything wrong with having a pay version, or even going the red hat way with "priority" ftp, but the ISO's should be available... Solo Mi Dos Centavos

I agree... if a company is going to have a GNU/Linux distributions, seems to me they should abide by the GNU License.

They are abiding by the terms of the GPL. There's nothing in the GPL that requires you to make your distribution available for free download. The GPL only requires that anyone you give the software to (whether gratis or for a fee) must also be able to get the source code -- possibly for another small fee to cover the cost of providing it. And the GPL requires that you inform the recipi

The current version (as reviewed is 2.8); but you can download "Libranet Essential Edition 2.0", dated July 2002, from LinuxISO.org [linuxiso.org],
Download.com [com.com], etc. Probably could aptget that to something close to the latest version.

--I tried 2.0 on a P166 Compaq laptop and it was basically useless. Wouldn't enable the PCMCIA stuff, so no Ethernet, so no updates.:(

--I went back to Knoppix. Actually I'd like to support Libranet's efforts since it would be BAD if they went out of business, but I'm not going to pay $40 sight-unseen for a distro when I haven't had a JOB for TooFkgLong.

If you think their prices (i.e., not free) are unreasonable, you can put up your own download site. (I believe that the entire distribution is GPL.) But be warned, if you don't distribute the source together with the binary, you are obligating yourself to keep the site open for... I think it's three years after the last binary is downloaded.

If someone else thinks the same thing, they can do the same thing. Most of it is already in the Debian mirrors.

Is Windows ready for the server?Is Windows ready for the shell?Is Windows ready for the 99.999%?Is Windows ready for open standarts?Is Windows ready for taking the competition with the best OS in the world?

I'm sure this has been asked and answered the world over - but, in light of this post - I'm left wondering what Linux distribution I should run... if I do at all. I run FreeBSD for all my server operations, and have used Windows for development, multimedia, etc for years. I run XP right now - with multiple monitors.. and as long as multiple monitors are supported, I want to move off windows completely. I really don't know whether to stay with FreeBSD across the board - or admit that Linux is a great "deskto

I've used red hat,mandrake,gentoo,freebad obsd (as a desktop), gentoo and windows 2000. If you want to try a linux distro i'd go with gentoo. It has
portage as does Freebsd. The one thing I like about gentoo over Freebsd on the desktop is that it's more polished. For instance, want some xmms-skins or some mplayer skins? Just emerge mplayer-skins , emerge xmms-themes. I was suprised to find that fluxbox had come with extra themes when I emerged it.
So try them both.
As far dual monitors, Yes.

...if that Font AA stuff he's telling about is true. I have never seen consitant/existing font-AA across the desktop (Motif/QT/GTK/whatever/etc.) on Linux.If they managed to untangle the font config and renderlib mess that would be a good thing indeed.

>> I have never seen consitant/existing font-AA across the desktop (Motif/QT/GTK/whatever/etc.) on Linux.

Neither have I, and that's why I bought a Mac when it was time to put my Intel box out to pasture.

Many posters here equate legible screen fonts to "candy" or "useless crap", but how many of them would spend hours every day watching a television that was just slightly out of focus? Or reading a newspaper that was just a tad blurry?

I know that debian is released "when it's ready" but does that seem like it's going to be anytime before 2004? If there's a release schedule, I've yet to find it on the debian.org website.

I love the security of running stable (I run it at work, and soon at home, probably,) but I do wish stable had a few more current packages (and I know I can hack/etc/apt/sources.list and add lines for specific packages, but I'd like a debian distro without as much work. I mean, I can't get the 2.4 series kernels in debian

Having just installed Debian last week on my girlfriends computer I can tell you that the default kernel is 2.2.20. I then upgraded to sid and it didn't change the kernel during the upgrade. Follow that with:
apt-get install kernel-source-2.4.20
and NOW it is running 2.4.20. Since her machine is an old Pentium 100MHz I'll probably leave it there since I don't have the patience to wait for it. It took hours to rebuild the kernel -- then I made a mistake in selecting the drivers -- I picked the SYM53C8XX

The author of the referenced article himself claims that a Celeron 533 with 128MB RAM is a low-end system. Secondly, he doesn't appear to have the necessary skills to trouble-shoot the problem, yet his review is referenced here! (seems to me, something wrong with the mobo - probably would've failed an XP instln as well, who knows?)

My point is, do Slashdot folks need slick GUIs and features, or, a working distro that does good h/w detection and is more robust? I'd place my money on the latter criterion, how

"claiming that Libranet draws too much resources is simply ridiculous."

If you read the ref. article, you'll see that he calls it a low-end system. He's sort of implying the distro failed to install due to lack of resources. IMO, the review is neither professional, nor thorough.

"Be careful with your quoting as well."

Point taken... I'm still figuring out with Momzilla on RH7.3 - some problems if I post HTML formatting - it seems to ignore para breaks. Sorry.

If a distro needs anything faster than a 533 Celeron and/or more than 128MB RAM, it's got to be ranked as useless. From a Linux standpoint, though.

Nope. This would not make it useless, with the cheap prices of hardware these days I don't think this complaint is enough. With the latest program offerings from this Distro it seems to offer more "candy" which takes more power. If you just want gnome and no 3D, little sound, and to be able to operate a few programs at once then a less bloated Distro is idea

I tried installing on an Intel Celeron 533MHz/128MB system... I was initially curious to see how well this release would run on a lower end system.(128MB - lower end for installing a distro?)

In plain English: It didn't.

This is a trend in computing in general - software, especially operating systems require ever more resources to do exactly the same thing. Windows XP needs the abovestated as a minimum to run. Win98SE would run fine on a Pentium 90 with 16mb of ram. The next version of Windows will probabl

Your thesis that most geeks tend to have hardware less than 18 months old doesn't ring true to me, and your statement that most Linux dostros "run like a dog" on a Athlon 875mhz with 512mb of ram & 7200rpm hdd system seems suspect to me.

In fact, most of the (non-gamer) "geeks" that I know are rather happy with 1-2 year old (or more) hardware. None of my boxes have specs that surpass yours, and Slackware just zips along. As a matter of fact, were it not for Linux, I would never have been able to contin

I tried installing on an Intel Celeron 533MHz/128MB system... I was initially curious to see how well this release would run on a lower end system.(128MB - lower end for installing a distro?)

In plain English: It didn't. This is a trend in computing in general - software, especially operating systems require ever more resources to do exactly the same thing. Windows XP needs the abovestated as a minimum to run.

First, there is no way this install failed BECAUSE of the cpu/ram limitations. More likely he h

--I've successfully gotten Win98SE to run quite well on a 486-75 with 16Meg, no CDROM, and a permanent swap file.

> My computer is an Athlon 875mhz with 512mb of ram & 7200rpm hdd - this should be fine as a desktop computer for a long time in theory, but WinXP from 2001 would run slowly on it, and Linux distros run like a dog on it.

The lack of installing I can guarantee was due to some incompatible hardware. Up until a few weeks ago when the harddrive went out in my laptop I had been running Libranet on it for over a year and had no problems and this was a P266mmx laptop w/ 96ram. The only thing that Libranet may need more of than a standard debian install, out of the box anyway, is HD space as it installs a few more things by default.

The reviewer is making an assumption; he really has absolutely no idea why Libranet didn't work on that particular computer. It's likely that it had absolutely nothing to do with the processor speed and amount of RAM.

What the hell is driving you to MS? Alot of people don't like the direction you seem to want gnome to head. Claiming KDE is sorta less than free while you are busy trying to clone a patent mined technology produced by one of the most virulant software companies in recent memory is absurd to say least.

Well it has to be redistributable under the terms of the GPL, like with Red Hat 9 people were downloading it before they got to the mirrors from people that payed for it. People thought it was illegal but it isn't. So if you really want it you just have to look for a.torrent to download or something like that.

No, there is NO obligation under the GPL for a distro maker to host ISOs at their expensive for the benefit of freeloaders like yourself.
"Free software rulez yeah! Gimme the source! What, I have to pay for it? I'll stick to my pirate copy of Wind0ze thanks."

The Linux community aren't exactly top of the pops in the corporate world, much in fact due to their rather immature birdlike mascot.

Immature? Rubbish. It reflects what the linux developers are doing perfectly. Not trying to be corporate, not trying to be 'top of the pops'. Simply making cool stuff because they enjoy doing it. It's upto the various distros to present that processional 'corporate' face. And they are doing it just fine thank you very much.:)

Considering this, and the recent problems Linux have had with corporate penetration, I can't see why domain names like Mad Penguin are chosen.

Maybe because the owner of the domain liked the name? *shrug*

The only effect is to drive away potential serious customers.

Again, this is a distro specific thing. Redhat and Debian both are very well presented. Presentation is not the problem, not by a long shot.

You seem to be suffering from the misconception that Linux is some kind of business "product" which must be "marketed" to "customers". Please disabuse yourself of this notion. Linus chose the fat penguin logo because it was cute and funny. He doesn't give a dang if it makes the project seem less "professional", and neither do most of the rest of us penguinistas.

If some company (redhat, lindows, libranet, suse) wants to package and sell the work of the community to their customers, then the marketing of Linux is their problem; don't try to foist it off on us, because we could not care less.

In short, Linux is not a business! So don't expect us to behave like businesspeople.

The Linux community aren't exactly top of the pops in the corporate world, much in fact due to their rather immature birdlike mascot.

Yeah, that's it. When I installed Windows XP Pro, I got a cute little frog as my login icon, and my wife got at cute little yellow rubber duck. So that must be why Windows is losing ground in the corporate sphere. Not!